Greeks vs. Torah

by Rabbi Nota Schiller

The Greeks, the Midrash relates, darkened the eyes
of the Jews with their decrees, saying to the Jews, "Write
upon the horn of an ox that you have no portion in the G-d of
Israel." What did the Greeks mean by this very cryptic decree?
How does this decree epitomize their dark designs against the
Jewish People?

Approximately
150 years before the Maccabees, a Hellenistic king in Alexandria
ordered the translation of the Written Torah into Greek. In a
sense, his need to become appraised of the Jewish world view and
endow his massive Alexandrian library with Torah wisdom was a
compliment to the Jewish People.

Miraculous events attended
the translation: Each of the scholars summoned to Alexandria
emerged from his private cubicle with an identical Greek translation.

Nevertheless, the translation
of the seventy, the Septuagint, was a tragic moment for the Jewish
People, a tragedy our Sages describe as "three days of darkness"
which descended upon the world. What was the tragedy?

The Jewish People either exist
as a separate entity or cease to exist. Anything mitigating or
threatening our monopoly on Torah depreciates our ability to protect
our uniqueness as a people. As soon as we share that monopoly
with others, the Torah becomes merely another source of wisdom,
another culture, another subject in the university catalogue.
Ultimately we are to impact the world community, but only through
maintaining the integrity of uniqueness will that impact come
about.

One thing diminished the tragedy:
Only the Written Torah was shared. The Oral Torah remained the
exclusive property of the Jewish People, its transmission still
necessitating the Teacher-Student relationship.

When I was in yeshiva in Baltimore,
many of the boys took courses at Johns Hopkins University. The
Semitic Studies Department was then headed by William F. Albright.
Clutching a photocopied page of the Talmud, the frustrated Albright
once approached one of the yeshiva boys and said: "I've
translated the text and correctly identified the etymology of
every single word on this page; but I can't for the life of
me understand what it's saying!"

Albright's problem was not
accidental. It was anticipated and orchestrated by our Sages.
They knew that if an Albright could understand the Oral Torah,
then Torah as a product of transmission from scholar to
disciple, with the particular approach and perspective of the
Jewish People, would end. We would not need a Chaim Berlin, a
Torah Vodaas, or a Ponevezh. If we are no longer the sole guardians
of the Torah, our uniqueness and purpose as a people are eclipsed.
To mitigate the quality and specialness of our purpose is counter-productive
for the nations of the world.

When, 150 years after the Septuagint,
the Greeks said "Write upon the horn of an ox that you have
no portion in the G-d of Israel" they were in effect saying
"Give us the Oral Torah! Just as you translated the Bible,
now write down Torah she'beal peh and grant us access to
it as well. As long as that part of the Torah remains oral, no
one else can approach it!"

The roots of conflict between
the Greek world view and the Torah world view can be seen in the
Book of Genesis: Emerging from the ark, Noah became drunk and
compromised himself. Shem and Yefes, seeing their father's shame,
took a garment, walked backwards to avoid gazing on Noah, and
covered him. The Sages explain that it was Shem who initiated
this action; but, walking backwards with a blanket draped over
his shoulder was a tricky business, and when Yefes saw that Shem
could not take action alone, he helped. At select times in history
Shem and Yefes cooperate. For most of history the relationship
is defined by conflict. The ideal situation is expressed in the
blessing awarded to Yefes - "Yishkon B'ohaley Shem"- "He shall dwell in the tents of Shem." The aestheticshould be in the service of the true.

Yefes is the progenitor of
the Greeks. Yefes perceived his father's indignation on the aesthetic
level, as something distasteful and aesthetically base. The action
he took to correct the situation was merely cosmetic. He did
not see the violation as essentially evil, his action was optional;
if necessary, he was available to participate. But he wasn't
the one to initiate the action because it just wasn't that important
to him.

Shem, on the other hand, is
the progenitor of Abraham. Shem experienced his father's indignity
as evil, and a suffering to be assuaged through an elementally
good act, an act which - in and of itself -positively
effects his own soul. Shem wanted the mitzvah, the very execution
of which has a nourishing consequence. Hence, he initiated the
action.

From ancient Greece through
the age of chivalry, and even in the cowboy/hero movies of our
generation, you find the following scene: two protagonists meet
in the middle of the street or town square at high noon to duel.
As long as one gives the other a fair chance to draw, he may
shoot him down. Whether the opponent is evil is irrelevant; a
fair chance is all that counts.

The Jew, however, rejects the
"fair chance" ideal. Rather, if you face an evil opponent,
a Stalin or a Hitler, you shoot him in the back. Whereas, when
facing a man who is not essentially evil, you have no right to
kill him just because you give him a fair chance.

If man is created in the image
of G-d, then life has essential value. If man was not created
in the image of G-d, however, man must reduce the gnawing emptiness,
the absence of Right and Wrong, by instead turning life into a
game, a showdown where "fair chance" resembles truth.
Some people play checkers, others chess. Some people play poker,
others bridge. The more involved the game the deeper man can
engage his intellect - but only to focus less upon life's meaningless
because life in the godless Greek mind is essentially a game.
We simulate a kind of dignity by honoring the rules of
the game.

All the world is reduced
to aesthetics and a game in this Greek world view. But the Jew
says no, that when G-d encountered man through the medium of prophecy,
man was charged with the mission to fulfill a universal role,
the performance of which is judged at the individual, communal,
and national level.

Historically, at Chanukah,
the Jews warred with the Greeks, yet there is no megillah,
no written work chronicling that battle. Why? Because it is
a story that must be transmitted orally, for at the center of
this battle was the Greeks' attempt to destroy the Oral Torah.
Instead of being conquered, we persevered and created a new holiday
that could only have been orchestrated through the mechanism of
the Oral Torah.

The blessing we say when
lighting the Chanukah lights is " Who has sanctified
us with His commandments and has commanded us to light the flame
of Chanukah." Where are we commanded? Which verse in the
Torah mandates such? The oblique origin of this mitzvah is its
very strength: Because the Torah endows our Sages with the initiative
in each generation to legislate for the Jewish People, a mitzvah
such as Chanukah symbolizes the power of the Oral Torah. That
which the Greeks sought to extinguish is symbolized in the light
that illuminates the darkness of exile.

Each holiday that Jews approach
is like a way station along the turnpike of history. The largest
distance on the highway had been between Succos and Pesach, between
which there was no holiday to stop off and refuel. In the darkness
of exile, G-d in His wisdom provided us with two more fueling
stations, Chanukah and Purim. When we celebrate Chanukah, we
celebrate a holiday that reminds us that it is the wisdom and
genius of the Jew, expressed and refined through the Oral Torah,
that makes us Jewish.

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